The Importance of Working With Others

As a person who has pretty strong auto-didactic tendencies, and as a person who can be intensely shy, my natural tendency is to work alone. This is not to say I don’t enjoy working with others, but left to my own nature, I’m holing myself up in my room & working on this one thing and pushing everything out until I get to where I want to be with that one thing.

Sometimes though, it’s important to work with others – even when you want to be in that solitary, hyperfocus-y state.

So, even though I’m pretty new to Python, I put together a Game Jam Team to make a video game. I was working with the other team leader the other day & she offhandedly mentioned a thing about Nested Lists* (ex: List = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], [7, 8, 9]])** & how you access the inner list by doing something like this: List[1][2]

And suddenly my mind was Blown!! I had seen this in code I was trying to understand & copy a bunch, and I MUST have covered this at some point in my Python learning, but I had just totally lost this piece of information along the way, and now I’m that much closer to being able to piece things together that had been eluding and confusing me before. I’m that much more able to understand all the game tutorials I’ve done & how to do many of the things that I just didn’t understand how to do, despite having done these tutorials

This never would have happened if we weren’t in the same room, at a Python Meetup working on the code for our Game together.

Similarly, she was having a bit of difficulty focusing that day, and I helped clarify and structure some things based on having Pygame code (and some examples) very fresh in my head. So, even though I’m a Much less experienced coder, I was able to help her get our game that much further along!!

**So in the case of this List, if you just type List[1] – you’ll get the whole [1, 2, 3]. So in order to get one of those individual things, you type List[1][3] & then you’ll get just the 3 that’s inside the inner list